Pretty disappointed with Ruby 1.9. I'm new to Ruby.
I surprised with the fact that Ruby had been neither UTF-8 native nor multilingual-conscious. In addition, Ruby WG decided to adopt a non Unicode-native approach to multilingual scripting. It hit me as well. Most text files I'm willing to handle are UTF-8 encoded with over 20 European/Asian languages.

To avoid encoding errors, I have to add several redundant and ugly mantra to the head of the Ruby 1.9 scripts:

#Ruby 1.0.3p0 script
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# $KCODE is not longer effective in 1.9!
Encoding.default.external = "utf-8" #set external encoding
Encoding.default.internal = "utf-8" #set internal encoding

Note that the line "# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-" is required in 1.9 multilingual scripting.